@Thinking Digital: Blogging is so 2005

Social media and technology experts have come to Newcastle for the Thinking Digital conference, and it began with a two hour session talking about the state of social media. Stowe Boyd started blogging in 1999 and coined the term social tools. He didn't quite declare the death of blogging, but he did say it was declining in importance as a wave of newer, quicker and easier tools developed.

When he asked the audience how many people blogged, less than a third in the audience of a hundred or so held up their hands, but almost everyone said they used social networks or the micro-blogging application Twitter.

Stowe had originally been quite bullish and optimistic about blogging, thinking that it would democratise publishing, but he found:

Blogs rhyme with slog. It's a small part of the population. It's too much work. ...

The heat and dyanmism of blogging is gone.

And he believes that blogging isn't as egalitarian as he initially thought. People who leave comments on blogs don't have the same status as the writer, the publisher of the blog.

Apart from the decline of mass blogging, he said that blogging has now been largely taken over by traditional media. "The pioneers have proportionally fewer readers. Now we have the strip-malling, the urban sprawl of the web. It's become another wing of the mediasphere." He has stopped using the term social media and now calls it web media.

Social networks have risen to take the place of blogging for the majority of web users, and as the social web was taken over by the sprawl of the 'mediasphere', he believes that there still needs to be a space for grass roots social media or even more space for social media. The most interesting things to happen over the last decade on the web have been social action by groups like Wikipedia. He said:

Just as we saw the rise of new urbanism saying that we have to think of shared space in urban settings and use that space for human purposes. We need to have the same rethinking that is theoretically involved in social media.

Stowe and JP Rangaswami, who works for BT and writes the blog Confused of Calcutta, talked about some of the new social media tools that are working in the age of micro-blogging and status updates. They talked about the URL shorteners like Bit.ly that embed a lot of information in the 140-character updates on Twitter. While some of this has developed organically, they also both agreed that some of what has developed will have to not only remade but in some cases dismantled.

JP said:

We have built constraints that we have to undo. We have to review the technical and legal constraints.

As has always happened as the internet has developed, the technology creates new situations that legal systems haven't anticipated such as bequeathing digital assets. When you die, who gets your passwords?